How to Use Travel Souvenirs as Décor

Featured Pro: Kristan Cunningham
Category: Home Décor
Time: 3:59


KRISTAN CUNNINGHAM: Hi, there. I’m Kristan Cunningham, and this is your GMC Trade Secret.

So if you’re anything like me, when you travel, the most exciting part of your vacation or trip is picking out the item that you’re going to bring back and put in your home to remind you of your trip, right? The problem is, very often we wind up going to the souvenir store and we get the most hideous mug we can find with the name of the town we were in, and then it gets shoved away in a cabinet. Let’s be honest. We all do it.

But I want to give you a few ideas of how you can really think a little harder about what you pick up so that it comes back and helps add to the overall collective look of your home.

What I like to do is pick up something that reminds me of that place that doesn’t necessarily say the name of that place. This is a feather I found in a town that I was visiting. It happens to be a local bird. And I thought it was very pretty; put it in a shadow box. It makes me think of that trip every time I see it.

This is from a little town that was settled by the Dutch, so I had to get a wooden shoe. It doesn’t say the name of the city anywhere, but it’s a nice graphic element that I have on my bookcase. It’s tasteful and it reminds me of that trip.

This was from a trip where my husband and I went for a long, beautiful hike. And when we got to the bottom of the mountain, instead of buying a T-shirt from that park, we got a pretty walking stick. It sits right next to the front door in the umbrella stand. I think of that trip every time I see it.

But if you’ve already bought all the T-shirts, as most of us do - and most of them are, let’s be honest, ugly - there’s still something that you can do with those too. I’ve taken one shirt already and measured it out and cut it. What we’re going to do is take basic canvas pillow covers, place this guy right in the middle – looking good and centered. Next we’ll take our fusable bonding. This is basically like ribbon glue. It sets with the steam of an iron. It’s the most amazing thing on the planet.

I’m just going to take that, move over here to our ironing board. It tears right off in strips. But you want to tear as close to the length of your fabric as possible, because if it does get out from the edges and it sticks to your iron, that iron can’t go on your clothes anymore because it is glue, essentially. There we go. Okay. Now, the steam is what makes the fusable bonding work. So if it’s not steaming, it’s not stuck.

Okay, the placement of that is looking great. The edges, however, are not. So to finish those, I’m going to use a little bit of blanket binding. Okay, T-shirt is now a pillow. Isn’t that cute?

Okay, next one is for the walls. We’ve all got a hundred pictures that we take on vacation. A lot of times there’s eighty of them in the same shot with the same people in the same outfit, and you can’t put all of them out. But there’s a tasteful way to incorporate your photos into your home and have them really look like part of your official interior.

There’s a website called (inaudible). So choose a photo that you love from your vacation. I chose this one because it’s so architectural and soft. It will really make a nice interior piece, versus a vacation photo. So once you upload the photo, a grid is placed over it and the squares of that grid make up how many sheets of paper your photo will print out on.

But what’s cool is this system pixelates your pictures in a way that looks really graphic. So up close you’ve got this look – a series of dots, essentially. But the key is to make it as many frames as possible, as many as you can fit on your wall, for a great big statement. And you step back and the photo starts to appear.

And that is how you incorporate your vacation items into your home tastefully.

I’m Kristan Cunningham, and that’s your GMC Trade Secret.